Mickadeit: O.C.'s first Vietnamese judge retires

On Wednesday, Orange County Superior Court Judge John Nho Trong Nguyen celebrated his 75th birthday with his staff and, later in the afternoon, stepped down from the bench for the last time and into the pages of Orange County history.

Nguyen was the first Vietnamese-American judge in Orange County. His departure leaves just one Vietnamese-American on a 123-judge bench in a county where Vietnamese-Americans account for about 6 percent of the population.

Judge Nguyen and I have a history. In 2008, when he was up for re-election, he was challenged by an attorney named Timothy Nguyen. Challenging a sitting judge is rare. Attorney Nguyen told me he felt Judge Nguyen was overly hard on him and his Vietnamese-American clients – overcompensating, the attorney felt; he could never be accused of favoritism.

I found no other lawyers who would say this. The OC Bar Association gave Judge Nguyen its highest rating, and he won easily. Still, I knew the allegation stung the judge and it also forced him to campaign, which judges hate.

But when you look at the entirety of Nguyen’s life, that incident was one of his lesser trials. He was in the South Vietnamese Army from 1965-67 and in that country’s Congress from 1967-75. As South Vietnam was falling to the communists, he contemplated staying and starting a guerrilla army, but his American friends told him it would be futile. He climbed the wall into the U.S. Embassy in Saigon and boarded a helicopter. Forty-five minutes later, the city fell.

Judge Nguyen called me last week and asked me to lunch at Lucille’s in Tustin. His wife, Bang Van Pham, brought me the manuscript of her memoir, which is a flat-out beautiful read. I will write more about it later, but today, I’ll focus on the chapter where she tells how her husband became a judge.

He was a deputy state attorney general in 1999, when Westminster’s Little Saigon exploded in protests because a video store was displaying the flag of the communist government of Vietnam. He participated. “My husband shouted until he was sore in the throat,” his wife wrote.

After the protests ended, Nguyen, his wife and some friends hosted a “Thank you, America” gala that was attended by many prominent politicians. Shortly after, federal District Judge David Carter, a Vietnam veteran with influence in the Democratic party, invited the Nguyens dinner at a restaurant on Balboa Island.

“Nho,” Carter said after the small talk had concluded, “do you want to be a judge?”

Nguyen was hesitant, his wife even more so, mainly because they feared it would take more time away from his family. Carter was persuasive.

“Gov. Gray Davis wants to appoint a Vietnamese judge for the first time in Southern California,” Carter told Bang. “We have discussed this and decided that Nho is the most qualified.”

Bang finally gave in. “If I continued to oppose, it would be like bringing an apple to my husband and forbidding him to eat it. … He was not like me, who was content with a simple, peaceful life.”

The judge believes his presence on the O.C. bench was both substantive and symbolic. When Vietnamese did come before him, he could relate in a way other jurists could not.

To one young defendant, he told him that his name meant “river in the mountain,” and that his parents must have had great aspirations for him. In addition to probation, Nguyen ordered the offender to “go home and take a long, hot cleansing shower, and then come out and hug your parents as long as you can.”

He had seen the defendant’s mother crying in the courtroom and he believed that not only would his words have an affect on the defendant but would instill in his parents a sense “that there is somebody in the courthouse who can understand them and their culture.”

This is true, he believes, even though he obviously didn’t only see Vietnamese litigants in his courtroom in Westminster. Word spreads in Little Saigon. Needless to say, he thinks Gov. Brown should appoint at least one Vietnamese-American to the O.C. bench, where there are now eight vacant seats.

In retirement, he and his wife want to find that “simple, peaceful life” that eluded them. He also wants to write his own memoir.

“She put me to shame,” Nguyen laughs.

Mickadeit writes Mon.-Fri. Contact him at 714-796-4994 or fmickadeit@ocregister.com